MDG7 Digest 1 - Slums

The movie, Slumdog Millionaire, was a box office success, nabbing Acadamy Awards, BAFTA Awards, and Golden Globes. However, once the Hollywood lights dimmed, the child actors from India that had become so instantly recognizable all over the world, went back to living the way they had before—in slums. There were even reports about one child actor’s father trying to sell “the Oscar child” in order to get their whole family out of the horrible living conditions they were still in. Whether that particular story is true, the desperation behind it is very real for many people all over the world, including India.

Slums are a common by-product of poverty. According to UN Habitat, the definition of a slum would be “a heavily populated urban area characterized by substandard housing and squalor. Essentially, a slum is an area that combines a number of these elements: inadequate access to safe water; inadequate access to sanitation and other infrastructure; poor structural quality of housing; overcrowding; and insecure residential status. Slums happen and are perpetuated by a number of things, including rapid rural-to-urban migration, increasing urban poverty and inequality, insecure tenure, and globalization.

The last target of Millennium Development Goal 7, ensure environmental sustainability, is to achieve a significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers by 2020. Interestingly, the adoption of this goal is the first time that slum dwellers and urban poverty reduction have been included in an international development goal.

Click here for Millennium Development Report 2010.

However, a number of problems have come up with this particular target. First of all, unlike the rest of the MDGs, that target of 100 million slum dwellers is not set as a proportion to any baseline. Instead, it is put at a specific number and applied to the world as a whole, making it difficult for countries to set any country-specific goals. Also, when it was adopted in 2000, the goal of improving the lives of 100 million slum dwellers was deemed realistic and thought to be quite a hefty number. However, in 2003, new data showed that 100 million was a mere 10% of the actual global slum population—much too low to demonstrate any sense of real change.

Click here for UN Habitat’s The Challenge of Slums.

So far, sub-Saharan Africa is lagging far behind the other countries with 62% of the population living in slums, but this is an improvement from the 70% recorded in 1990. Southern Asia recorded an impressive jump from 57% of the population living in slums in 1990 to only 35% is 2010. However, despite improvements, there is a lot of work that needs to be done.

The number of people living in slums has declined from 39% in 2000 to 33% in 2010—around 200 million people. However the number of slum dwellers in the developing world is still growing, partly exacerbated by the recent housing crisis. Where the number of urban residents living in slum conditions was estimated at 657 million in 1990 and 767 million in 2000, there are now some 828 million people living in slum conditions.

Living conditions in slums are often intolerable—housing insecurity; lack of basic services, such as water and sanitation; and unsafe building structures. Slums have an extremely high concentration of poverty and social and economic deprivation. Occupants have limited access to credit and formal job markets due to stigmatization, discrimination and geographic isolation. Slums are often what the city is trying to get rid of: industrial effluent and noxious waste, and often the only land accessible to slum dwellers is fragile, dangerous or polluted – land that no one else wants. They are susceptible to diseases such as typhoid and cholera, and HIV/AIDS. Slum areas are also commonly believed to be places with a high incidence of crime, though it us unfair to label residents as perpetrators, since more often than not, without proper avenues to authority and safety measures, people who live in slums are the victims.

Click here for UN Habitat’s Urban World.

Security of living in a safe and healthy place is vital to every person. Like most of the others, this target touches on all the other MDGs in its successes or its failures.

Right now, many countries are resorting to plans of slum clearance or slum eradication, which just serves the purpose of moving slums from one area to another in the best case scenario. Usually, the product of this type of misplaced focus is the destruction of community social bonds, disruption of livelihoods, the creation of huge future transport, energy and environmental costs by just packing people into the city without any plan for urban growth.

There is a lot of good work that is being done to help slum-dwellers.

In India, Oxfam has set up informal schools that help educate children who live in slums. Many children work as rag pickers in Indian slums in order to support the family. Sorting through the rubbish thrown away by others, it is dangerous, unsafe, and it doesn’t pay much. This often means that there is no time for school. However, these informal schools open in the afternoon when most children don’t do rag-picking. There they learn to read and write so that they can be admitted to state schools.

Click here for the full article.

Chile has seen a remarkable reduction in the number of slum dwellers—from 126 thousand families in 1997 to just 20 thousand in 2010. A Roof for Chile is a foundation helping to further reduce that statistic. It funds the purchase and transportation of housing materials, but depends on volunteer work  to build a wooden house for the beneficiary family. The small wooden houses serve as decent, but temporary, emergency homes for the families as the Foundation helps them apply for state subsidies for the construction of solid permanent dwellings in the new low-income housing projects that slowly replace the country’s slums. 

Click here for full article.

Azalea Lee, August 2010